If you want to use the DSP, you need to add 'mem=99M@0x80000000 mem=128M@0x88000000' to bootargs for 256MB ram devices and 'mem=99M@0x80000000' for 128MB RAM device or 'mem=99M@0x80000000 mem=384M@0x88000000' for 512MB RAM devicess.
If you want to flash MLO and u-boot to NAND, these are the u-boot commands you need to use:
NOTE: in recent u-boot versions (e.g. 2008.10) the 'nand ecc' command has been renamed to 'nandecc', so without a space in between to compensate for that 'mmcinit' is now 'mmc init'

To the Beagleboard Beginner

These short notes aim to help beginners get a working Angstrom system running on the beagleboard.

How to Unpack and Boot the Demo Image

Format the SD card using mkcard.txt. For example: sh mkcard.txt /dev/sdX, where X is the drive letter of the SD card. On systems like Ubuntu that would look like 'sudo sh mkcard.txt /dev/sdX'.

Copy MLO and u-boot.img from http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/demo/beagleboard/ to the first partition

Unpack the tarball to the root partition of your Beagleboard SD card.NOTE: superuser privileges are required when unpacking the image so that
device nodes can be created on the SD card filesystem.
eg. for Linux:

This assumes that the SD card has the root filesystem (ext4) partition mounted
as /media/rootfs.NOTE: unpacking can take several minutes due to the amount of data.

Ensure all SD card filesystem operations have completed (ie. filesystem cache
has flushed to SD card) and eject the SD card from your development
machine. Most operating systems have a "Safely Remove" action to
perform this from the Desktop.

Insert SD card into Beagleboard and power it up.

NOTE: Use external 5V supply and remove all USB connections from the
Beagleboard when booting for the first time. Try USB later once you know it
works.

What to Expect

Watch the serial port output. You should observe the following:

The U-Boot startup.

Kernel uncompresses and boots.

Lots of kernel messages for up to a minute while filesystem scanning happens
and the system boots.

At the end you should see a login prompt below the Angstrom ASCII-art
logo. The root password is empty (just press enter if asked for a
password). You can now login to your new Angstrom demo system.

What If...

Some common problems and their fixes

The kernel panics at random points during start-up.
Either use the 5V external power supply or use one of the multi-config-cpudile kernels. Sometimes the current via USB is not enough, but the cpuidle kernel should help with that. That comes at the cost of garbled characters on the serial console when it goes into a lower power mode.

Even with the 5V supply the kernel panics during start-up.
Ensure that you copied the uImage file from the Angstrom filesystem into
the boot partition. Compare md5 checksums to be sure.

USB Ethernet doesn't work at startup.The culprit is the
composite USB gadget driver. In etc/default/usb-gadget
set USB_MODE='networking' and run the module reconfiguration script
(name?).

The USER Button

The USER button on the beagleboard is your get-out-of-jail card. It allows
reapir of a "bricked" beagleboard. If you break the software badly
like writing a broken bootloader to NAND flash on the beagleboard, the USER
button allows you to undo the mistake.

If you hold down the USER button at power on, the beagleboard will look for
x-loader and boot loader code in the SD card instead of loading it from NAND
flash. Under normal operation the the boot loader is located in NAND flash. In
this normal case the kernel and filesystem still usually remain on the SD
card.

Once the beagleboard has booted into the kernel, the USER button is just an
input which can be used for any purpose you desire.

What Next?

Once you have a working Angstrom system you may want to connect it to: